Chapter 26 Natalia
NATALIA
I’m not going to fucking kill Natalia.
My mind is a blank, white space. A canvas wiped clean by that single, impossible sentence.
The sound of it, spoken in Luca’s voice, doesn’t just echo in the hotel room. It detonates. It’s a bomb that vaporizes the last three weeks of my life, leaving nothing but a crater where I used to be.
I blink, and tears fill my eyes for the monumental, soul-crushing stupidity of my own heart.
He’s standing there. Luca. Luca Andretti.
Not just an enemy, but the enemy. The name that has been a curse on my family’s lips for as long as I can remember.
And I brought him into my home. I nursed him back to health.
I touched him. I let him inside my body, whispering his name like a prayer while he was thinking about how to kill me.
I’m such an idiot.
A strangled noise, half-laugh, half-sob, claws its way up my throat.
“Natalia, please.”
I blink hard and finally manage to focus on him.
He looks wrecked. Brows drawn tight, chest rising too fast, hands open at his sides like he’s approaching a cornered animal.
And that’s what I am. I see it now. I was never a person to him. I was prey.
“I can explain,” he says, his voice a hoarse, urgent rasp. “How did you—I thought you were still—”
“My phone died. I took a cab.” I don’t give him time to respond. “You want to talk about that right now? Or do you want to explain why I just heard you tell someone you’re not going to kill me?”
“Natalia, please. It’s not what it—”
“Not what it sounds like?” The question is a shriek. I scramble away from him, the movement so violent I nearly trip over my own feet.
I don’t know where I’m going. I don’t know how far a hundred bucks and a full-blown panic spiral can get me in Vegas, but I know I cannot stay here.
Not with him.
“It actually sounded pretty simple.” My fingers fumble so badly on the strap that I almost drop my purse. “It sounded like everything out of your mouth has been one giant fucking lie.”
The words are gasoline, and my rage is the match. “How could you? Everything we did, and you were an Andretti the whole time? I let you touch me. I let you…”
I can’t say it. The memory of his body over mine, the feel of his skin, the sound of his breathing—it’s all curdling in my stomach.
Was it all a ploy? A tactic? Had any of it been real? The sketch. The kiss on the beach. The way he held me in the dark. Or had it all just been part of the job?
He flinches. “I didn’t know the whole time.”
“When?” I back up a step. My shoulder blade hits the doorframe. “When did you remember exactly who you were and decide not to tell me?”
His throat works.
“The day before we left for Vegas,” he says, his voice ragged.
The room tilts.
I actually have to slap one hand against the wall to steady myself.
Before Vegas.
Before Anna.
Before I introduced him as my boyfriend, giddy and stupid and full of hope.
Before he stood beside me while Anna smiled at us like she could see something good taking root in my life for once.
Before the hotel.
Before last night.
Before this morning.
Before all of it.
“Oh my God.” The words come out as a whisper. Then louder, harsher: “Oh my God.”
My throat closes. Not sadness. Something hotter. Something that tastes like iron and humiliation and the specific, searing shame of a woman who handed another person the knife and then watched them decide whether to use it.
“I was trying to find the right way to tell you.”
“The right way?” My voice cracks loud enough to bounce off the hotel walls. “The right way?”
My laugh comes back, uglier this time.
“By not telling me?”
I shove past him deeper into the hotel room.
The bed is still unmade from this morning.
His sketchbook is on the nightstand, open to a half-finished drawing of the dunes back in Moratoc, and the sight of it makes me want to scream because even his art feels like a lie now.
Every gentle thing he did was built on top of something monstrous, and I decorated my own cage with it.
I grab my bag from the closet. I don’t have enough money for a flight, but I have enough for a cab to somewhere that isn’t here.
“Natalia, stop. Please.”
His hand catches my arm.
I flinch.
For one suspended second, everything in the room goes dead still.
Luca freezes.
Not just stops. He recoils. Takes two full steps backward, and his hand drops to his side like it’s been burned. The look on his face. God. Like I’ve just confirmed something he suspected about himself. Like I’ve shown him exactly what he is.
I have never seen a human being look that devastated in real life.
Good, a vicious little voice in me whispers. Good. Let it hurt.
His mouth parts, but no sound comes out.
The silence stretches so tight it could snap.
The air conditioning hums. Vegas pushes its muffled noise against the window, all that manufactured brightness out there, completely indifferent.
“I would never hurt you.” His voice is barely there. Scraped raw. “I couldn’t. I swear to God, Natalia.”
“You already did.”
He absorbs that like a blow. I watch it land in the way his shoulders pull in, in the way something in his face seems to cave under its own weight. And I hate that some broken, disloyal part of me still notices his pain.
I do not get to care about his pain right now. I do not get to feel sorry for the man who was going to put me in the ground.
“I know the amnesia doesn’t excuse any of it.
” His voice is rough enough to scrape. “But when I washed up on that beach, I didn’t know.
I didn’t know who you were, who I was, any of it.
And by the time I did, I was already...” He runs a hand through his hair, and I hate that I know the gesture.
“I was already gone for you. Completely. I should have told you immediately, and I didn’t, and I’m sorry. ”
“Yes, you should have.”
“I kept waiting for the right moment.” He grimaces. “There wasn’t one.”
“You still had a choice, Luca.” My throat burns so badly the words come out thin. “Every day after you remembered, you had a choice. You stood in my kitchen. You came with me to see Anna. You slept in my bed. You let me keep falling for you while you knew exactly who you were.”
His face goes white at that. Good. Let him wear it.
“Why?” I whisper. Then louder, because whispering is not enough for this kind of hurt. “Why?”
He knows what I’m asking. He opens his mouth, then shuts it again. When he finally speaks, every word sounds dragged over broken glass.
“Because my family wanted revenge. Because your family took someone from mine, and I told myself that made you fair game. That if ending you ended the war, then that was what had to happen.”
Fair game.
A cold wave crashes over me from head to toe.
I am not Natalia. Not a woman. Not the person who bandaged his head and fed him and brought him into her home.
Just a Kozlov daughter. A body to answer for somebody else’s sins.
“So that was all I was?” I ask. “A piece on the board? A body you could use to settle a score?”
“No.”
“It was at first.”
His silence answers for him.
I nod once, because apparently that’s the part that finally gets all the way in. Not the Andretti name. Not even the lie.
The fact that if the storm had broken a different way, I would be dead.
“If you hadn’t lost your memory,” I say, “do I get this conversation, or do I get a shallow grave?”
He looks like I’ve put a knife between his ribs.
“I don’t know,” he says.
He doesn’t rush to cover it. Doesn’t dress it up. Doesn’t lie to me again.
“I don’t know who I would’ve been if that storm hadn’t happened. And that scares the shit out of me.”
Pain cuts through me so cleanly I almost fold around it.
Because I believe him.
Not enough to trust him. Not enough to forgive him. But enough to know he means it.
Which is worse.
I want to throw something. I want to claw the wallpaper off this hotel room. I want to go back three weeks and leave him on that beach, facedown in the sand, and walk the other direction and never look back.
But I didn’t. I picked him up and brought him home and cleaned his wounds and fed him and kissed him and slept with him and fell for him, and none of that was his fault. I did that. I chose that. And that’s the part I can’t get past.
Not that he’s an Andretti. Not that he lied.
That I chose this. That for the first time in my life, I reached for something because I wanted it, and it turned out to be the worst possible thing I could have grabbed.
I wish I could make myself hate him cleanly.
I wish I could strip this down to something simple, something sharp and survivable.
He lied. He’s the enemy. Leave. But it isn’t simple, because I didn’t fall for a mask.
I fell for the man who made pasta in my kitchen and listened to Anna tell the same story twice and looked at me like I was something worth keeping.
Maybe that man is real.
Maybe he is also the man standing in front of me admitting he once meant to kill me.
I don’t know what to do with both of those truths living in the same body.
“Nat.”
“Don’t.” I swipe at my face with the heel of my hand. “Don’t say my name like everything is still the same.”
He drops his gaze. When he looks back up, there’s nothing polished in his expression. No strategy. No charm. Just a man standing in the wreckage of his own choices.
“You’re right. I lied,” he says. “I kept lying. And part of me told myself it was because I was trying to protect you, or trying to find the right way, but that wasn’t the truth.
” He pauses. “The truth is I was scared. I knew the second you looked at me like this, I’d lose the only good thing I’ve ever had. ”
My chest pulls tight.
I hate that I believe that, too.
“I’ll leave them.”
I blink at him.
“What?”
“My family.” His voice steadies, not because he’s calm, but because he’s certain. “The Andrettis. I’ll walk away.”
A disbelieving sound slips out of me. “You cannot be serious.”
“I am.”
“You’re talking about your family like they’re a job you can quit.”
“I’m talking about walking away from people who only want me when I’m willing to do something ugly for them.”
There’s more force in him now. More heat. Not the polished kind. The kind that comes from something torn open.
“I’ve spent my whole life trying to be enough for them,” he says. “Trying to prove I’m not the screwup, not the kid brother, not the one they use when they need a mess cleaned up.”
My hand twitches at my side. The impulse to reach for him is so automatic it disgusts me.
“And for what? So I can become exactly the kind of man you just flinched from?” He shakes his head once. “Fuck that. I’m done.”
The words punch through me because they’re real. I can hear it in them. Fury. Grief. Shame.
And still.
Words are words.
“You’ve known me for three weeks.”
“I know.”
“You’d leave the Andretti family. For someone you were assigned to murder.”
“For someone who showed me I don’t have to be the person they decided I was.”
My chest aches, sharp and physical, in that place where hope lives before it learns better. Because the terrifying thing is that I believe he means it. Right now, in this room, I think Luca Andretti would walk away from his family and everything he’s ever known.
Maybe it does mean something.
Maybe it still isn’t enough.
“You can’t make me trust you by blowing up your life in front of me,” I say.
“I know.”
“Do you?” I whisper.
“Yes.” The answer comes instantly. “I know I can’t fix this today. I know I can’t say one perfect thing and make you feel safe again. I know I don’t deserve that.”
He takes a breath. Lets it out shaky.
“But I’m telling you the truth now.”
I close my eyes.
That should not hurt.
The truth now.
As opposed to before.
My pulse throbs behind my eyelids. My fingers ache from how tightly I’m clutching my purse. The hotel room feels too bright, too small, too full of stale conditioned air.
I want out.
I want away from him.
I want to go back six hours and stay asleep forever.
I want to slam myself into his body and sob until none of this is real anymore.
I want too many impossible things at once.
When I open my eyes, he’s watching me like I’m the only thing keeping him upright.
That look used to melt me.
Now it just splits me deeper.
“What do you want from me?” I ask.
His expression changes—softening, breaking, something in between.
“Everything,” he says.